Frankenstein
Shelley gives her novel this subtitle, directly referencing a titan from Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods.
The Modern Prometheus
The two main tramp characters who spend the entire play waiting beside a solitary tree.
Vladimir and Estragon (or Didi and Gogo)
The Austrian-German director who created this pioneering 1927 silent science-fiction film.
Fritz Lang
The term for the imaginative, cohesive space constructed by a composer through style, form, and medium.
Literary World
The state of intense political, social, or moral chaos that serves as the central setting and catalyst in this module's texts.
upheaval
The structural device Shelley uses through Robert Walton’s letters to nest the inner narratives of Victor and the Creature.
frame narrative (or epistolary structure)
The post-WWII theatrical movement, categorized by Martin Esslin, that explores existential angst through circular plots and stasis.
The 1920s German artistic movement characterized by exaggerated set designs, stark chiaroscuro lighting, and distorted geometry to externalize internal emotion.
German Expressionism
The cultural, historical, and personal environment that shapes both a composer's creation of a world and an audience's reception of it.
Context
The speculative fiction genre frequently featured in this module that depicts an oppressive, state-controlled, or collapsed society.
dystopia
The 18th-century intellectual movement emphasizing empirical science and reason that Victor embodies, which directly contrasts with Romanticism.
Enlightenment
The dramatic structure wherein Act II closely mirrors the sequence and setting of Act I, reinforcing the inescapable loop of human existence.
circular (or repetitive) narrative structure
The film's central moral motto stated in the opening and closing intertitles regarding the synthesis of intellect and physical labor.
"The mediator between the head and hands must be the heart"
The degree of internal truth, believability, or realism that a text establishes within its constructed world.
verisimilitude
The capacity of an individual to act independently and exercise free will when confronted by system-wide collapse.
human agency
The 1667 epic poem by John Milton heavily quoted by the Creature to articulate his existential isolation and rejection by his creator.
Paradise Lost
The master-and-slave character pair whose relationship highlights physical degradation, tyranny, and mutual codependency over time.
Pozzo and Lucky
The ancient Canaanite deity that Freder hallucinates the machine transforming into as it consumes sacrificing workers.
Moloch
The complex relationship constructed when a text references or absorbs another text to expand its own world and meanings.
intertextuality
The historical paradigm shift driven by rapid technological growth and urbanization that generated widespread fears of human dehumanization.
Industrial revolution
Edmund Burke’s aesthetic concept describing a mixture of terror, awe, and human insignificance that Victor experiences in the Swiss Alps.
The sublime
The theatrical technique demonstrated by Lucky's unpunctuated, rambling monologue in Act I, symbolizing the collapse of formal human reason.
stream-of-consciousness (or the breakdown of language/discourse)
The biblical story retold by Maria in the catacombs as a cautionary allegory warning the elite against intellectual hubris and the division of language between social strata.
the Tower of Babel
The self-referential literary technique where a text explicitly draws attention to its own artificiality and narrative construction.
meta-fiction
Michel Foucault’s theoretical concept of institutional surveillance and internalized discipline, often analyzed in this module to explain how power structures control citizens during periods of systemic crisis.
The Panopticon